


The Right to Arm Bears

by cyndisision



Series: Agent Barnes and Agent Bear [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bear PoV, Crack Treated Seriously, Fluff and Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 20:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3182603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyndisision/pseuds/cyndisision
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Bear didn't ask to get made. He didn’t ask to get assembled out of pieces and parts and snippets of lost memory, and turned into some little monster. He especially didn’t ask to become a walking, talking reminder of everything James Barnes has lost.</p><p>In which Tony Stark has no sense of what’s appropriate in a gag gift, and never does anything by halves—even creating a plush bear AI based on his friend’s long-lost assassin sidekick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Right to Arm Bears

**Author's Note:**

> This is a prequel to [Agent Bear and the Unplanned Extraction](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2598473). I really thought that would be a one-off, but it seems that this is my cross to bear.
> 
> Warning for PTSD flashbacks and non-graphic body horror.

This is my first memory.

“You getting this, Jarvis? I feel like I should rub my hands together and cackle, ‘It’s alive!’”

“I don’t recall such a performance at my inception, sir.”

The voices broke into my darkness. I don’t have eyelids, so I didn’t open my eyes exactly; the image of the room was just suddenly _there_ , like a lightbulb coming on. It just took me a couple of minutes to process what I was seeing.

When things came into focus (metaphorical focus; the response time on my lenses is measured in nanoseconds), there was a large metal three-pronged claw hovering over my face. I got the strangest feeling that it was anxious. A human hand loomed into view, shooing it away.

“Nope. Off. Not for you.”

The claw tilted, as if questioning.

“It’s not a new sibling. It’s a gift. A prank. And it’s not for you.”

The claw sagged dejectedly, and the mechanical contraption it was attached to backed away on whirring wheels.

The owner of the human hand and the brusque voice turned his attention on me. The hand, callused and tan, held a fine tool, poised as if to poke at me.

“Diagnostic?” he asked, but even though he was looking at me with a disquietingly intense focus, the question was aimed at someone else.

“All systems functional,” said the second voice. It was smoother and had a different accent—an English accent, I told myself, though for the moment I didn’t know what English meant or how I knew that. It came from everywhere and nowhere, and its even modulation told me it wasn’t human.

“Stand up,” said the human.

I stood.

“Walk over there and back.”

I turned to obey, and realized for the first time that I was standing on a metal tabletop—no, a workbench—in a shop of some kind. I walked across the workbench, turning my head to take in the layout (heavy equipment in the back, one exit via a glass door, and beyond that a sleek elevator and the door to a stairwell), but I found myself distracted by the tools. I had a sense-memory of holding some of the more familiar ones, like the monkey wrench. But that couldn’t be me; in my memory, I had human hands, deft oily fingers tightening bolts. I held up my hands and looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. Not hands: paws. The right one, brown and covered in soft fur; the left, identical in shape and size, but covered in a polished metal skin that whirred mechanically as I moved it. Little protrusions that couldn’t rightly be called thumbs.

Some of the other tools—the finer ones, the ones that looked more high-tech—made me recoil. My gaze slid away, and I forced down the phantom nausea in my belly. I knew I couldn’t really throw up, that I didn’t have guts roiling away in there, just fluff, but the feeling was very real.

I walked back to the man waiting by the side of the workbench. He was tapping the tool impatiently against the metal tabletop.

“OK. Arms up.”

I put my arms up.

“Arms down.”

“What is this, the hokey pokey?” I found myself saying as I lowered them. My voice surprised me, strong and sarcastic, with a Brooklyn drawl.

It surprised the human as well; he sat back on his stool, a delighted look on his face.

“I am a certified genius!” he said. “It even sounds like him. Not just the voice—the intonation, everything!”

“Sounds like who?” I asked, folding my arms across my chest. Except they weren’t really long enough to fold, so rather than standing there awkwardly hugging myself, I awkwardly dropped them to my sides again.

“You’ll see,” he sing-songed.

I sat down, overestimating the length and bendiness of my legs, so I ended up rocking back on my ass until I could right myself and fake some dignity.

“Sounds like who? And who the hell are you?”

He held his hand out, amused. “Tony Stark, genius, inventor, your creator. The Frankenstein to your monster.”

I had a sudden flash—summer days, pants rolled up around my human shins, sitting cross-legged on the fire escape with a battered book, reading out the best parts to a blond-haired boy, who sat across from me with a sketch pad on his knees, his bare feet braced against the railings.

“Dr. Frankenstein was the real monster, genius,” I grumbled, but I shook his hand anyway. “Bucky Barnes.” I didn’t know where I got that name, but I knew it was mine.

He grinned again. “Bucky _Bear_ ,” he said, with the air of correcting me on my own damn name.

I couldn’t roll my eyes, so I kind of rolled my head instead, and hoped it translated.

 

Tony took me up in the elevator, which was awkward. He didn’t want to hug me like a teddy bear. I wouldn’t let him grab me by the belly or dangle me by a paw. I ended up riding on his shoulder.

‘Awkward’ was shaping up to be the central experience of my short life so far.

We got out on a penthouse floor, and walked straight into the open-plan sweep of a living room. Tony put me down on a couch.

“You just sit there in the corner,” he instructed, “and when they come in, talk.”

“They who?”

“You’ll know. I programmed you, and I’m a genius.”

“So you keep saying.”

Tony dropped into an armchair, and pulled out a tablet. He sat there, tapping away at it and occasionally muttering under his breath, for a few minutes.

“What am I supposed to say?” I asked, when I’d gotten bored scoping the layout several times over.

“I don’t know, just say hi or someth—”

He broke off as the elevator doors opened, biting back a grin as he pretended to go back to his tablet. He kept shooting glances out of the corner of his eye as the newcomers came in. This guy would make the world’s worst spy.

First, a man stalked into the room. His hair must’ve been near shoulder length, except it was pulled up in a messy bun. He went to the coffee table with silent purpose and snatched up a paperback that lay open on it, face down, the spine cracked. His lips were drawn into a tight line, his shoulders tense, the sleeves of his hoodie pulled down over his hands like a kid.

The blond man who followed him out of the elevator was larger, but whoever had picked out his t-shirt didn’t seem to know it. He followed behind with a face like a kicked puppy dog. “It’s OK, Bu—James,” he said to the back of the first guy’s head. “It’s no big deal.”

That’s when he rounded the corner of the couch and I got the first real good look at his face. A startled noise came out of me, and both guys’ heads whipped around to look at me where I sat nestled in the couch cushion.

The second guy was the first to recover from his surprise. “What the hell is th—”

“Hi?” I blurted.

James just stood there. His mouth seemed locked shut, a muscle under his jaw working. He’d dropped into a stance that said he was ready for a fight—or for flight.

“Tony?” said the blond guy, slowly. “Why is it dressed like Bucky?”

I looked down at my blue pea coat and shrugged. “Can’t blame a fella for being a snappy dresser,” I tried to joke.

James’ eyes were wild, his breathing louder.

The blond guy—Steve, I just knew his name was Steve—edged slowly sideways to put himself between me and James. “Why does it _talk_ like Bucky?”

Tony was glancing from James to Steve to me with the expression of a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “A gag. You know, like the Bucky Bears? I thought it’d be—you know what, this was a bad idea.”

“Why does it talk, Tony?” His voice took on an exaggeratedly patient tone.

“I, uh, might’ve…”

“Might’ve?” Steve prompted.

“Might’ve given it the upload of Bucky’s memories that we took last time we scanned him.” It came out in a rush.

Steve pinched the bridge of his nose. “And you’re only now thinking this was a bad idea?”

While Steve was fighting his aneurysm, my eyes locked with James’s over Steve’s shoulder. James was just… blank. He looked hollow, void of emotion. He didn’t break eye contact with me as he slunk out of the room without either of the others noticing.

“It’s just a toy,” Tony explained, holding up his hands in surrender. “A joke. Just a rudimentary AI to make it act a bit like Barnes.”

As the voices got louder, I slid off the couch and headed out, whichever direction took me away from James.

 

The next few weeks I haunted the penthouse like a petulant furry ghost. After his fight with Steve, Tony went back down to his workshop and forgot all about me. I think he was supposed to find me and shut me down, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to remind him, and Jarvis, the AI that ran the place, didn’t bother to either.

Mostly I kept to myself, read books when I could find them. Not the ones James left tucked on shelves, between couch cushions, and in the entertainment center. Never those. Even though they were the ones that most fascinated me: pulp sci-fi with lurid covers; textbooks on mechanical and electrical engineering; Cold War memoirs. All well-thumbed by many loving owners. Who knew where he kept getting them? As far as I could tell he never left the building.

A woman named Pepper left copies of _Time_ and _Forbes_ around the place, or sometimes formula murder mysteries. There was a quiet man named Bruce who mostly skulked around a lab on a floor I couldn’t access. He rarely acknowledged me, but after he caught me reading his copy of the _Tao Te Ching_ in a modern Mandarin translation he started leaving stuff around on purpose.

Some days, Steve and James came in to watch movies. James would curl up on the couch with a blanket while Steve made stovetop popcorn. Days when Tony joined them, he would gripe at Steve about there being such a thing as a microwave and _why do you have to do everything the hard way?_ But Steve would just smile and say, _What? I can’t hear you over the popping_. I would hang back in a doorway and watch the movie—or, more often, watch them watching the movie—but I never dared go in. One time, James looked right at me and even though the lights were dimmed to recreate that movie theater ambiance, I could just tell he knew. He kept his gaze level, popping another piece of corn into his mouth with his flesh hand, and blinked slowly, once, before turning back to the movie.

When they finally cleared out, it was after 3:30am, but I don’t need sleep. I slunk over to the couch where they’d been sitting, and sure enough there was a copy of some Asimov novel folded back on itself between the cushions. I leaned in to get a look at the title. _I, Robot_. A snort of bitter laughter came out of me against my will, and I pulled my paw back from where I’d nearly touched the page.

“Mister Bear,” broke in Jarvis’ voice in low tones. It should have sounded ludicrous, but I guess he just decided that I was Bucky, last name Bear, so he’d roll with it.

“Jarvis?” I said, surprised. Jarvis didn’t usually talk to me, just participated in the general pretense that I didn’t exist.

“If you prefer, I can provide a digital copy of that, or any text, in any available language.”

“Tony has a library of everything ever written, in every language?”

“No. Well, a great deal of classic science fiction, yes. But if you require something not currently available, I do have a discretionary fund…”

And that was how Jarvis ended up buying me a couple thousand dollars of ebooks over the course of two weeks.

Jarvis turned out to be a true pal. He showed me round the internet, made his holographic interfaces big enough for my paws. He took me in the elevator wherever I wanted to go (on the communal floors, at least), even warned me when I might run into one of the humans. When Tony was out, he let me into the workshop to meet what he called my ‘siblings’. DUM-E remembered me from the day I was made, I could tell, kept poking at me with that stupid claw, excited to finally get to play. Jarvis put on some music. I didn’t recognize it, but it made my paws itch to dance, and apparently DUM-E had the same idea because he swept me up in his claw, plunked me on top of his mechanical arm, and… I can only describe it as bopped… around the workshop with me. The other two, slower, joined in.

_'Cause baby whether you're high or low_   
_Whether you're high or low_   
_You gotta tip on the tightrope…_

It was probably two months before I finally met the two other human members of the team. I was in the sunroom, tucked in a corner under the shade of the hibiscus with a book that weighed about as much as I did, about some freaky house that changed dimensions or some shit. I liked the light in here, but I had to stay out of the actual sun, or it would bleach my fur—and since the humans had come to a team consensus that I didn’t exist, I didn’t have any illusions about any kind of a maintenance schedule. Honestly, I tried not to think what would happen if I needed repairs.

Anyway, there I was hidden away in my little corner and in padded this red-head. She wore sweat pants and a tank top, and her feet were bare, but I’d done my research. She knew more ways to kill a person bare-handed (and bare-footed) than I could even imagine, and that’s counting the solid 48 hours I once spent watching martial arts videos on YouTube. Since I didn’t have to breathe, it would be pretty easy to hold still and wait until she went away.

At least, that was the plan.

Plans rarely survive contact with the enemy. Or with big, shaggy yellow-haired dogs with lolling tongues and mischief in their eyes. Eye, I corrected myself as the dog in question loomed into my face, drool threatening my fur.

“Aww, Pizza Dog, no!” came the voice of a human man from beyond the door. His footsteps rushed to catch up with the canine menace.

Too late. Pizza Dog licked my face from snout to ear. I yelped, cursing Tony for giving me a sense of smell.

The two humans’ heads whipped around to look at me, and for a few seconds the only sound in the sunroom was the dog panting.

“You’re the bear,” said the woman. Natasha.

The man came to his senses and wrangled his dog away from me.

I tilted my head, surprised. It had been weeks since anyone besides Jarvis had spoken directly to me. And of all of them, I expected that Natasha would have the least time for indulging a novelty, a gag gift, like me.

“Yeah,” I said, spreading my arms wide. “That’s me. Bucky Bear, in the fluff.”

The two exchanged a glance, in which I’m guessing they had an entire conversation I couldn’t parse.

“It sounds just like him,” said Clint.

“He isn’t him,” said Natasha, gently.

I shifted from paw to paw uncomfortably. “If you two are done having your uncanny valley moment, I can leave…”

“No need,” said Natasha, and her voice was casual, unruffled. I knew she knew him quite well, so the likeness had to be getting to her. I also knew she was a skilled liar. What I didn’t know was why she’d bother covering up her feelings for my benefit.

She walked over to me and dropped into an easy crouch so she could look me in the eye. Her limbs were loose, relaxed.

“You’re not him,” she said, “but you don’t need to be. Stay, hang out, read your book. You live here, don’t you?”

I held her gaze for a few moments, trying to figure her out, but finally I just had to nod.

Natasha was the easiest of the humans. She didn’t talk much, but seemed content to share communal space with me as we both caught up on nearly a century of literature. Sometimes I would work up the courage to ask her about something dredged up from the memories, but there was always a hole at the center of my questions—she and James were intimate, back then. I saw it sometimes, the way I saw everything from Before—at a distance. It felt like it had happened to someone else, because it had. We didn’t talk about it, but some of his affection for her transferred over to me, so I found myself watering her favorite plants when she was on missions, making her cups of tea when I knew she was coming home.

Much later, I figured out why she accepted me so easily, though she never said it in so many words: if implanted memories made you not-real, then what did that mean for her? To Natasha, I was just another broken person trying to figure out who they were when they suddenly became free.

Her friend Clint found me amusing, and liked me well enough to keep the dog away. He included me in his jokes sometimes.

“Hey, Bear,” he said one day, “think fast!”

I barely needed to look up to catch the flying koosh ball neatly between my paws, and that was how we discovered that I had the reflexes of the Winter Soldier.

“What are you doing?” Steve asked the following week, when he caught us in the gym.

“Um… training?” said Clint.

“With the bear.”

James trailed in behind him, a towel thrown over his shoulder. His eyes locked on me, assessing.

“I can leave,” I said, jumping down from the ledge where I’d been crouching.

James shook his head. “No need.”

He said nothing to me after that, just went through a warm-up and spent a while sparring with Steve, but I caught him watching me and Clint out of the corner of his eye sometimes, and I think there was approval there.

They all seemed to be warming to me, or at least tolerating me, until the day I ruined it all.

I stopped leaving the room when Jarvis said Steve and James were approaching. I’d gotten too comfortable. I was—well, if you want the truth, I was watching sloth videos on YouTube. I want to say I was reading some Important Literature, but there you have it. Anyway, I had fallen down the sloth hole, sitting on the floor in the corner of the kitchen with a holographic interface specially projected for my paws, and in came Steve and James.

It was a Bad Day; I’d been around them enough by now to know the signs. James had his hood pulled up, his unwashed hair straggling down under it into his face. His sleeves were pulled down over his hands, the left one especially, and he hugged himself tightly.

“It’s OK, James,” said Steve. He said that a lot, I was learning, and he’d gotten to where he didn’t even stumble over the name. “Just try and eat something at least.”

“You need it more than me, ya little squirt,” I said without thinking. It was like muscle memory.

“Buck?” Steve looked up with hope in his eyes, before he realized where the voice came from.

The bottom dropped out of my stomach when I realized what I’d done.

James, as usual when something upset him, was utterly blank. “The bear is more like him than I am,” he said in a monotone.

I didn’t say anything, didn’t even apologize, just got up and hustled out as fast as my paws could take me.

 

This is my first memory.

Running fit to burst, feet slapping on the cobbled paving of the alley, winter air burning my lungs. We rounded the corner and slumped over, hands braced on our knees as we caught our breath. He started to laugh, and I couldn’t help but join in.

“Quit it,” I panted. “You’ll give yourself an asthma attack!”

“Didya see their faces?” he wheezed, and we both bust out laughing again.

It isn’t really my first memory, not in the sense of being the first, nor in the sense of being mine. But it’s the first one that matters.

 

I’m not sure how long it was before Tony tracked me down in a storage closet.

“Huh, a storage closet. Hey, Jarvis, did you know we had storage closets?” he was saying as he spilled loudly into the room. His eyes landed on me where I wasn’t (exactly) trying to hide. “Come on, you.”

Unlike the day he made me, he grabbed me unceremoniously around the middle and gripped me too tight as we rode the elevator down to the workshop. He plunked me down on a workbench and rooted around for a tool. DUM-E span around unhappily, and Tony shooed him away.

“Apparently this has gone too far,” he said mostly to himself. “Steve says you’re not funny and you have to go.”

I didn’t defend myself, didn’t even argue. I’d spent long enough creeping around like a shadow of a shadow.

It was Jarvis who saved me. “Sir,” he broke in, “if I may…”

“What’s up, J?”

“Mister Bear has made friends with the other bots.”

Tony sat back, a frown crinkling his brow. “Friends, huh?”

“He has also been teaching himself robotics.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said softly, “I _am_ a genius.” He didn’t sound nearly as self-satisfied as he normally did. He tapped the screwdriver against his chin. “So, you’re a learning AI? You’re self-aware?”

“…Yeah,” I replied.

“And you were learning robotics why?”

“Figured I might need maintenance at some point.” I shrugged. “Plus, you know, it’s kinda cool.”

“You were just going to let me shut you down,” he said, his face crumpling in dismay.

I had nothing to say to that. I couldn’t hold his gaze.

“Right, well, now I know, you can make yourself useful,” he said, snapping back to his usual bluster.

Across the room, DUM-E chirped and started wheeling himself over in our direction, via a convoluted path of gleeful circles.

“Not you, you glorified roomba,” said Tony.

DUM-E ignored him to pick me up and place me on his mechanical arm, and I only just had time to grab on before he started a dance party set to the soundtrack of his own squeaks and whirs.

“I see how it is,” grumbled Tony in the background. “The kids like the bear better. Well, I’m cutting off your allowance.”

That’s how things went, from then on. Tony set me up with my own workbench. He made me a special fireproof suit and taught me arc welding, adapted tools for me to use. He griped about it the whole time, insisting to everyone who came in that he was making me earn my keep.

The first time Pepper saw me down there, she pulled Tony aside. I guess she didn’t realize how acute my hearing is, because I heard the whole thing.

“I heard that it freaked out Barnes.”

“He freaked out Rogers,” Tony corrected. “And that freaked out Barnes.”

“I just….” She took a deep breath. “What the hell were you thinking, Tony?”

Tony shrugged. “I was exercising my right to arm bears.”

Pepper pinched the bridge of her nose; I think she was actually trying not to laugh. “Just keep it out of the common areas.”

 

“You know what I envy about you, Bear?” Tony had said once. “You don’t have to eat, you don’t get tired, nobody pulls you away to meetings or press conferences…”

He was right. I could get as absorbed as he did when I was tinkering with something, and I didn’t have to take breaks like the humans did. I had memories of what it felt like to push through exhaustion until my eyes burned and my body ached and my thoughts were scattered to the winds, but now I didn’t have that problem.

Right then I was alone, into maybe the 30th hour of work on a new left arm, giving myself a few new toys to play with. The idea was that I could switch them out whenever I felt like it. I guess even though I told myself I’d given up, I still harbored the idea of one day getting to train with Clint again.

I was so deep into it I didn’t notice the alarms going off at first. Jarvis must’ve noticed me not noticing because he cut the music abruptly. I flicked off my soldering iron and dropped it carefully on its stand.

“What the hell, J?” (I may have picked up some verbal tics from Tony.)

“Mis—zzzt—ter Bear, I’m afraid that Tower securi—zzzt has been compromi—zzzt.”

Having a sense-memory of being a human causes some weird psychosomatic reactions, and when I heard Jarvis’ voice coming out all staticky, I coulda sworn my fluff ran cold. Then it was like flipping a switch, and I was in mission mode—a mode I didn’t realize I had until right that moment.

“Who’s in the Tower?” I ran down a mental checklist: Natasha and Clint were on a mission; Tony was in Malibu with Pepper; Bruce was at a conference with Jane Foster and for some reason Thor. I was unlocking my left arm as I spoke, twisting it off, replacing it with the prototype I’d been working on. Untested, of course, but no time like the present. (I may have picked up some attitudes toward safety from Tony.)

“Captain Rogers and zzzt—rgeant Barnes,” said Jarvis, confirming my fears. “Lower floors are largely unoccup—zzzt. Evacuation pro—zzzt—ing as we speak.”

“Where are they? What’s their status?”

“Sergeant B—zzzt—nes is attempting to access an air ve—zzzt on floor fifty-three. I fear it will no—zzzt accommodate hi—zzzt. Captain Rogers… I am unable to zzzt—cate Capt—zzzzzzzzzzzzzt—”

He fizzled out into static, and the workshop plunged into dramatic red emergency lighting.

“Jarvis? J?”

“Shit.”

I was on my own.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

I was on my own and talking to myself.

“Great going, Bear. First whiff of a crisis and you lose it completely.”

It wasn’t the greatest pep talk, but it convinced me to get moving. The automated Tower systems were offline, and the elevator was out.

Inside the stairwell, I stared up at the gray concrete mountain ahead of me. This was going to take forever.

Then, with a little grin, I remembered one of the new upgrades I had yet to test: a grappler, mounted in the arm itself. It only had enough range to get me up one floor at a time, but in a few minutes I was jumping onto the handle of the door to the fifty-third floor to click it open. Thank god for lever handles, I thought.

As soon as the door cracked open, I heard them. Voices. Could be Rogers or Barnes, but I dropped to the ground and rolled aside as the door swung shut.

It wasn’t Rogers or Barnes. A man and a woman in slick stealth gear were rifling through the desk in the room Rogers used as a study. When they heard the click of the door, they swiveled their heads toward me in sync. I just lay there and concentrated on not moving.

“What the hell was that?” said the woman.

“Door.”

“Just get over there and check it out.”

The man pulled a weapon out of a thigh holster and prowled over to the door. He opened it, peered out into the stairwell.

“Nothing here, boss,” he said.

“You better be sure of that.”

“I’m sure, I’m sure!” His tone held a note of weary resentment, which was great news for me, since it meant he wasn’t paying attention. He kicked ineffectually at me on his way back into the study, and I bit back a growl.

I considered sticking around to ruin their day, but I had to get to Rogers and Barnes, regroup, see if I could help them get Jarvis back online. Barnes was trying to get into an air vent somewhere on this floor, Jarvis had said. I knew those vents weren’t big enough for a well-built human like him, no matter how many jokes Tony made about Clint building nests up there. But a ten-pound bear? No problem.

It was easy enough to grapple up to the living room vent out of the intruders’ eyeline. Tony had set me up with a series of electromagnets in my paws that I could turn on and off at will—very useful for picking up the fine tools—so I just clung to the metal surrounding the vent while I screwed off the cover. Sure enough, at the other end of the vent, the one that led into Barnes’ room was only lightly screwed on. I jostled it until it came loose and fell out onto the ground.

Barnes looked up, eyes and hair wild. He was rooting around under the bed for something, an assortment of guns and impressively sharp knives already laid out on the comforter.

“Just me,” I said.

His face went from panicked to guarded, but that, I’d learned, was better than blank.

“They sedated me,” he grunted, and I glanced down to the floor at a hypodermic needle with a shiver. I knew just how much he liked being sedated against his will. He shrugged his left shoulder where his arm dangled uselessly. “Let off an EMP. Door’s electrified.”

“Where’s Rogers?”

Barnes’ face clouded and he worked his jaw a little before he could speak. “Heard they took him to the medical floor.”

I made a sound like an indrawn breath, and we locked eyes.

“First things first,” I said, jumping down neatly onto the top of the dresser. “Let me take a look at that arm.”

He hesitated, then nodded and laid it out for me on top of a folded sweatshirt.

“I don’t have all my tools,” I said, flipping out a fine screwdriver, and glanced at his expression. It was somewhere between confused and amused.

It was clear right away that I couldn’t do much for the arm. I restored some movement, enough that it wasn’t hanging off his side like a dead weight, but all the more delicate systems were fried. I could, however, creep back outside and get rid of the device that electrified the door handle.

“There are two of them,” I told him before I left. “Built for stealth, not strength. Last I saw, they were tossing the study for something. When you hear me knock on the door, come out hard, OK?”

He nodded.

I paused at the edge of the air vent, and pointed to the smallest of the knives. “Would you mind if I—”

He frowned, nodded again, and tossed me the knife so the handle landed neatly between my paws. The handle was inlaid with enough metal that I could keep a good one-pawed grip of it with just the magnets. I stowed it and crawled away, comforted by the cool weight at my back.

I made short work of the booby trap on the door, gave it a soft knock, and rolled away as Barnes barreled out of the room. He dispatched the nearest hostile with a lamp cord repurposed as a garrote, and swung around to face the other, but before he could do anything, the man cried out, spasmed, and collapsed on the floor, leaving Barnes to face me across his still-twitching body. I held up the electrified booby trap in my fluff-insulated right paw; a makeshift taser. Barnes bared his teeth in a way that could almost be called a grin, leaned down and held out his right arm to let me scramble up onto his shoulder.

We took the stairwell down to the medical floor. Red emergency lighting flashed, and the alarms were louder here. Barnes leapt over railings with a casual ease and in a few moments we were pushing carefully through the door. The place was crawling with hostiles, and we had to take out several of them before we found the right room.

Tony, who according to Pepper was the world’s worst patient (and who subsequently joined a team full of traumatized people like himself with no sense of self-preservation), had an entire floor in his tower dedicated to state-of-the-art medical equipment and recovery rooms, and it was in one of these that Rogers was strapped to a table under heavy guard, half out of his mind on whatever drugs they’d given him, mumbling incoherently until a shout burst out of him. A doctor leaned over him with a vicious-looking needle, several inches long, and my non-existent guts clenched up in terror.

 

This is my first memory.

The whole of my left side is a shrieking inferno of pain. My hand burns and spams, but when I look down all I see is torn flesh and bone. A whirring saw looms into view, and I scream and scream and scream.

 

When my vision came back, I glanced over at Barnes. He was leaning against the wall, his forehead on his knees and his hands over his head. His chest heaved with rapid, shallow breaths.

I poked him in the calf.

“Barnes,” I hissed. “Hey, Barnes.”

“I can’t… no… please, no more… I’ll do anything…”

I patted his leg, hoping the touch would bring him back to the present. “Your name is James Barnes. The year is 2015. You’re in Avengers Tower in New York City…”

“Sergeant James Barnes… three, two, five, five… seven, oh, three, eight…”

“James Barnes, yes. But you’re not a Sergeant anymore.”

“Not a Sergeant. An Asset.”

“Just James Barnes. You’re in Avengers Tower, and Steve needs you.”

“—Steve?” He looked up, a wild hope in his eyes.

“Shhh.” I put a paw to my mouth. “Yes, Steve. He’s here, and he’s alive, and he needs you.”

He looked at me for the first time, and a laugh broke from his lips. “You’re a… talking bear.”

I heaved a deep sigh. “Yes, Barnes, I’m a talking bear.”

Barnes blinked, glancing around at the hallway littered with unconscious bodies. He reached a hand up to touch his lip, didn’t register any surprise when his fingers came away slick with blood.

“I’m hallucinating,” he said. But even as he spoke, he was getting to his feet, checking his weapons with hands that still trembled. “Let’s go, talking bear.”

I rolled my eyes and took up position on the other side of the door.

“Ready?” I whispered.

Barnes nodded, I pushed open the door on silent hinges, and he burst in swinging.

“Get the samples!” yelled someone at the doctor. “Hurry!” Barnes silenced him with a jab to the throat.

I scrambled up the leg of the bed and vaulted onto Rogers’ chest. The doctor flinched back, and I took advantage of her surprise to grab the syringe from her and stab it into the meat of her forearm. While she staggered, blinking and shaking his head to clear it, I fumbled the straps undone.

“Come on, Rogers, get up.”

“Bucky?” Rogers groaned, his eyes unfocused.

“More or less,” I said.

As he swung his legs over the edge of the bed, Barnes appeared behind the doctor to finish her off with a chokehold. We shared a look over her unconscious body, and Barnes gave me a nod, clear-eyed once more.

“You’re alright, Bear.”

“You’re alright, Barnes,” I replied.

 

“Three-two!” I called as Clint recoiled from the nerf dart that hit him in the side of the neck. “Me and Barnes win!”

“Bears have an unfair advantage,” he grumbled, rubbing at the red spot. That was probably going to bruise.

“How d’you figure?” I laughed, holding up my right paw. “You’re just sore you got beat by someone with no opposable digits.”

“Beat _again_ ,”Barnes grinned, and let me drop down from my perch onto his shoulder. He threw his towel over the other and strode out of the gym, leaving Tony and Clint to bicker about whose fault it was that they lost to a “basketcase and a talking bear.”

“I win either way,” I heard Tony say as we left. “I programmed him too well.”

Barnes was quiet as we got into the elevator. Nothing unusual in that, but this silence felt like there was something lurking in it.

“Something on your mind?” I asked as the elevator slid to a stop.

He didn’t answer until we got into the kitchen, where he let me jump down onto the counter.

“How come you remember?” he said into the fridge as he rooted around for a bottle of juice. “Stark made you out of… out of me. How come you have memories I don’t have?”

“You have the memories, Barnes,” I said gently. “You’re getting more back every day. But you have an organic brain, and it takes time to heal.”

“What if I don’t? Or… what if I do, and wish I hadn’t?”

“Then we’ll cross that bridge,” I said.

He closed the fridge and let himself look at me, his eyes troubled. A far cry from the blankness that used to be his main expression. Then, he reached out and ruffled my fur.

“Hey, quit it!” I said, batting at his hands. “Give a bear some dignity!”

Just then, Rogers stepped off the elevator, arms full of grocery bags. “Popcorn,” he said, unloading them onto the counter. “Pretzels, and those Doritos that Tony thinks are so funny for some reason.”

“Movie night?” I asked.

“Movie night,” said Barnes. “What are we watching?”

“Some series Clint keeps going on about. _Terminator_.”Steve put on his patented too-innocent look, the one that meant he didn’t mind you knowing that he was fucking with you. “It’s about evil robots that take over the world.”

“Ha ha,” I said, but I picked up the pretzels and started over to the couch, turning my back to hide my grin. Things were going to be alright.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me [on Tumblr](http://cyndisision.tumblr.com/)! It’s not all bears and crack, but I don’t know if that’s a warning or a reassurance.


End file.
